Ruminations on law and life

Bar exams and mackerel in the moonlight.

A month from now, it’ll be exam time. Not an oral exam — but the July bar exam administered the last week of the month everywhere except for Wisconsin, which has the“diploma privilege.”[1]

For the rest of the states, including the District of Columbia, this year’s May crop of law school graduates will be tested to satisfy “what bar examiners have always posited as the bar exam’s purpose, i.e. minimum competence to practice law unsupervised.”[2]

Not to be missed, however, is how one school is trying to slow their own nosediving exam scores. Charlotte Law School’s Assistant Dean of Student Success employed four-letter exhortations to her professors serving as bar prep coaches. Straddled with Charlotte’s abysmal bar passage rates, Assistant Dean Odessa Alm admonished the professors to insist on more urgency from their graduates. “We’re not cheerleaders. We’re coaches. ‘Get down on the f***ing floor and give me 40. You’re going to run more laps.’ That’s what a coach is. A coach is not a cheerleader.” See “Recordings Shed Light On Charlotte School Of Law’s Methods To Boost Bar Passage.”

In 2014, with scores falling, the Iowa State Bar Association looked for another remedy. It proposed an in-state “diploma privilege” like its Wisconsin neighbor. But the Iowa Supreme Court closed the door on the proposal opting to keep the bar exam in place. According to one news report, “Critics said it was a way for Iowa law schools to boost enrollment, which has been falling in recent years.” Also see “As schools lower standards, more flunk the Iowa bar.”

And in a step akin to moving the iceberg closer to the Titanic, the American Bar Association (ABA) put law schools on notice last year that it intended to tighten the deadline rule for graduates to pass state bar exams. Yeah, full steam ahead.

According to data compiled by the Internet Legal Research Group, the bottom ten law schools with the worse bar passage rates reflecting first-time test takers for the summer 2014 and winter 2015 bar examinations were:

1.

Appalachian School of Law

33.3%

2.

Thomas Jefferson School of Law

44.7%

3.

Golden Gate University Law School

45.1%

4.

Mississippi College

45.8%

5.

Whittier Law School

45.9%

6.

U. of the District of Columbia

52.2%

7.

Liberty University

52.8%

8.

Ave Maria School of Law

54.4%

9.

Arizona Summit Law School

54.7%

10.

Southern University

55.8%

Since the report, life hasn’t gotten any easier for some of the listed schools. Last month, the Los Angeles Timesreported that“due in part to low student achievement,”Whittier Law School was closing. And earlier this month, Arizona Summit Law School in Phoenix was put on probation by the ABA after just 24.6 percent of its graduates who took the Arizona state bar exam for the first time in July 2016 passed.

In California, after the state’s bar exam passage score fell to a 32-year low, the deans of 20 California law schools wrote the Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court asking that the minimum or cut score needed to pass its bar examination be lowered to allow a higher pass rate.

In truth, with apologies to John Randolph, the mackerel have been shining and ripening in the moonlight for sometime. Declining law school enrollments; falling admission standards; and collapsing bar passage rates are mere symptoms.

Until the legal establishment makes a substantive, detached, top-to-bottom assessment of what’s ailing the profession, the diagnosis will be incomplete; the medication will be misprescribed; and the patient will remain as sick as ever.

______________________________

[1]”Under diploma privilege, graduates of the University of Wisconsin Law School and Marquette University Law School are admitted to the practice of law by complying with the terms of SCR 40.03 — their school certifies their legal competence and the Board of Bar Examiners certifies their character and fitness for the practice of law.”

4 Responses

Great post, and brilliantly illustrated. These deans have real gumption. The bar exam was just fine until they decided they wanted to admit previously-unqualified applicants. They are demonstrating pathetically weak reasoning in shifting blame to the bar exam. It’s almost as bad as the time Dean Erwin analogized law schools to medical schools where students are taught by highly trained and skilled doctors. http://abovethelaw.com/2014/08/law-school-dean-thinks-law-school-is-important/

Michael, you make too much sense! The trend now is to do away altogether with the LSAT as a gauge of potential law school success. The GRE is okay, apparently. Why not the MCAT, too? If you can’t get into medical school, just send those test results to the closest desperate law school looking for students.

One would think that as law school enrollments decline, the reduction would come mostly from the bottom end of the applicant population in terms of LSAT scores and academic abilities, which would result in a higher average ability among the remaining student population. I am guessing that what is happening is that potential applicants who have somewhat better LSAT scores and academic records are focusing more on higher ranking law schools where overall lower law school enrollment is opening slots. The lower ranking schools are losing students at the top of their classes, and are taking on more students who are less competitive. A loss of law schools at the bottom of rankings would seem to be a natural and even desirable result.